Best Way to Build an Ideal Marketing Team for your SaaS Product Startups

Photo by Pascal Swier on Unsplash

Have built a SaaS product and looking to take it out to the market and are confused about how to build a good marketing team with limited resources and budget? Allow me to share my 2-cents on the same.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity of building and managing the marketing teams of multiple AI & Tech Products. This may not 100% work for you, as it depends on what your product is, its target group, and the goals that you want to achieve, but this for sure will give you a good headstart.

Marketing is a huge function in itself. You will always have a non-marketing team member coming up to you and asking ‘are we doing this? <insert something which you know you have to do, but with the limited resources you cant>. The point being there is no end to marketing activities.

So how do you choose what has to be taken on priority?

Your priority is a function of the following two things -

1. Well defined goals
2. Realistic budget idea

For better understanding and to keep things real and make this reading valuable I will be sharing how I built my team here at PEXAR -

As we are an early-stage startup and we are yet to test the water, here are the goals that we identified -

• Understanding the market gap and what other products in our space are doing — Competitor Research
• Creating a buzz in the market — Content
• Establish a strong Position in the market well — Branding

Keeping the above goals in mind, it’s clear we will need the following skills in the team -

• Content strategy & management
• Branding
• Content writing skills
• Market research
• Product marketing
• Operations/Generalist
• Graphics
• SEO

So my team composition is -

1. Marketing/Branding Leader — I have worn this hat. I create plans, manage the team, own the marketing goals if the team doesn’t deliver the goals it’s completely on me.
2. Content Creator — This is a fairly new role in the corporate market, especially in the SaaS product space. But as they say content is king, and you cant build a kingdom without the king! The content creator will be instrumental in creating the community that will be the first userbase of the product(and if the product delivers its promise, the first customers too)
3. Content writer — This person will fuel the content creator’s ideas, translate the product promise into easy blogs and writeups, emails to customers, product documentation, and anything and everything that needs words.
4. Marketing Associate(Generalist) — All-rounder of the team. As the team is lean most of the folks will be juggling between multiple roles and responsibilities. This person will be the captain of the multi-tasking ship. 😎 Product marketplace management, Marketing Operations, Reporting, etc.
5. Graphic Designer — The sooner you get one, the better it is. If you are not skilled in graphics then you should hire someone with 3 years of experience at least. If you have a good eye for design then 1–2 year experienced designer should be fine too.
6. Interns — Product Marketing Intern & Market Research Intern
7. Agency Support — For tasks like Brand Strategy, Branding, SEO where you need more than 1 person to complete that activity rather than hiring a team, it’s always better to outsource it. There are good agencies who can do a good job for you which will be cost-effective and of good quality.

Some learnings that I would add -

1. Hire Interns — Due to a shortage of budget, we can’t afford experienced marketing ninjas. So better to pick up really smart interns. You may not get seasoned players to score goals right from the first match, but a couple of weeks of practise matches and they are ready to win matches for you ;) But make sure you draft very precise plans for them, else they will be lost. Meet them every day, be a good teacher here, rather than being a good boss/manager. But at the same time make them feel like they are full-timers/employees and just not interns.
2. Team’s energy — Important thing is to have a good team that has the same energy level as yours.
3. Use tools to make your work easy and efficient (we will take you through the products that we are using to achieve the same)
4. Small wins — Don’t be overwhelmed with the number of things that you will see in front of you. Focus on small wins.
5. Outsource whenever possible — SEO, Digital Marketing, Branding, Hiring — Whichever tasks need more than 2 people should be outsourced.
6. Delegate and trust your team — Understand when the team is lean the manager/head has to do a lot of things herself/himself. But if you don’t let the team do it on their own they will never get better and you will end up becoming the bottleneck

Hope this is helpful for you. Would like to know your thoughts on the same.

Ps. I am hiring for a few of the above roles. You can check the open positions here — careers.pexar.io